


Stealing Time

by oonaseckar



Category: Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe - After College/University, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, College, F/M, Gen, M/M, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28961619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: Alt. universe: Eliot and Hardison are exes.  They parted on bad terms as college sweethearts, when Eliot was a WASPy Harvard legacy case, and Eliot was a scholarship nerd.  (Or: when Eliot was a rich, idle party-boy and Hardison was working his way through, as well as acing his courses.)  Eliot's still nursing a broken heart.But his old blue-stocking suffragette Aunt Sophie has a machine bodged together in her basement/laboratory.  She swears it's a time machine.  And as well as being a bit of a loon, she's a certified Nobel-winning genius physicist.Eliot figures it's worth a try.  Maybe he can change a few outcomes.  Maybe he can get Alec back...
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Eliot Spencer
Kudos: 2





	1. when you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results

**Author's Note:**

> Languishing orig fic magicked into fanfic. there ya go.

Time, eh? It would be handy to be able to unpick time like a bit of knitting. To tear the strands of love out, and stitch some cool indifference in. Wouldn't it? 

In the shadows, Eliot watched an earlier version of himself. It was a younger, happier self. He was dancing and laughing, with another young man. This kid ruffled younger Eliot's hair in a familiar way, while older Eliot watched. The boy smiled, as he dropped his eyes under olive lids, baby-deer eyelashes descending. He was blatantly, extravagantly conscious of being adored. By Eliot.

And this younger Eliot - this fool, this doting dummy - bent his head, and tried to gaze into his eyes. He chased a kiss, chasing after love, touched a flushed cheek with much too much reverence. If older, wiser Eliot had had long enough arms, he'd have smacked him.

If Eliot had been holding knitting, right then, it would have come unraveled in his hands, torn apart.


	2. if stealing time were easy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is a contracted and modified quote from Sophie Devereaux in Leverage.

Eliot considered aunts to be less useful than time, or the manipulation of time. He had one, his Aunt Sophie, and she was _one more than enough._ He only ever called her Sopes, though. Or sometimes Annie, or Katherine, or Charlotte, because Sophie was a little bit strange about names. As well as about everything else. Close on a hundred -- a ninety-four year old teenager, a hooligan -- in this year of our lord 1990. And a notorious old witch.

Not _literally_ a witch, in this prosaic world, lacking magic and glamour. Not quite. As far as he knew.

She was ex-Girton College, Cambridge -- part of the stodgy old Brit branch of the family. A physicist, an atheist. A former suffragette and bluestocking, crusading for women's rights, in the early decades of the century. And she'd allegedly been all fists and elbows in scuffles with the law, using her boots on infuriated British bobbies. Violently refusing subjection and subordination, _inviting_ force-feeding. Running amok in Cambridge, flouting academic convention, too brilliant to ignore.

A genius, in fact. A loose cannon, as well.


	3. sometimes the bad guys make the best good guys

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is Nate.

And normally more trouble than she was use, to Eliot. Although not _always_. Mostly she drove him up the wall, ever since she'd offered him a room in her house while he was up at Harvard himself. On the other hand, in a tricky spot she often proved her worth. When he'd chucked up Political Economy for Music -- unprofitable, unwise, unconventional -- she'd backed him up, one hundred percent, for example.

And when he'd come out as gay, she'd faced down his parents and made them back off, too. (In his last year. During his final exams. The timing could have been better, but he couldn't blame anyone else for that.)

So he gave her credit. it was only that she was a little nutty. Her gifts were strange, and sometimes disconcerting -- the gifts she possessed, and sometimes the ones she gave. And his birthday was coming up, which was good reason to be a bit uneasy in his mind.

He wasn't surprised that she called him up a week before his thirtieth. Nor by the invite to come and stay. Well, it was more of a _royal command_ , really. "I'd love to, Soph," he began, tactfully. "But..." Every tactful evasion and evasive tactic, she shot 'em down one by one. By the end of the call, he was committed. To a spell in the nuthouse, really.

Just as long as she didn't try to spring a birthday party on him, though, he'd put up with it. That would be the last straw, the outside of enough. One had been a lesson, and now he was on the alert every year.


	4. crazy clowns called GeeGee who whisper your name from under your bed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is Parker from Leverage.

Everything else he gave into. What else did he have to do, on his birthday? In any case, she got at him unfairly, with talk of her weak heart and her probably tragically short lifespan. The old bag had no scruples at all. She always got her way, no point resisting her. It would be just like her, to snuff it out of awkwardness, if he stood on his principles _this one time_ and refused to give in.

He didn't have the strength to resist her, anyway. Not at end of the last college semester of the year. He wasn't a student anymore, but still. It was supposed to be a wonderful time, free and easy. All the escapees and released convicts from academic servitude, free and crazy and happy. Finals were over, undergrads getting ready to launch themselves into summer vac. And the new graduates were starting out in the real world, diplomas in hand, new adults.

So different from his own experience. After he'd (barely) graduated from Harvard, he spent it crying in the narrow bed of his final year campus accommodation. (After he'd moved out of Sophie's, to finally avoid her affection and nosiness). He wasn't answering friends' calls. He wasn't bathing or eating much, either. Partly due to his crappy degree classification. He'd been shell-shocked during revision by his parents' traumatic reaction to having a gay son. But mostly, it was about being dumped by his boyfriend. Hardison, an artificial intelligence/business student with gorgeous brown eyes, and a sexy thrilling inner-city accent, and aspirations to take over the world. And Eliot in his back pocket, from the moment he'd laid eyes on him.


End file.
